Obama’s Faltering Balancing Act in Syria
Moderates within the Syrian opposition are increasingly losing ground—literally and figuratively—to extremists, and the Obama administration is partly to blame. If this trend persists, America is likely to lose its ability to shape events in Syria, which will have disastrous consequences there and beyond. Worse still, it may already be too late to reverse course. It has become obvious that the administration’s reluctance to more robustly strengthen Syrian moderates and the extremists’ ascendancy are two sides of the same coin. Largely because radical groups generally have access to higher-power weaponry than what the U.S. has been willing to provide to the moderates, recruits are flocking to the extremists’ ranks. Nobody should have been surprised by reports late last month that thirteen powerful rebel factions formally broke with the exiled Syrian National Coalition—the political arm of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA)—to form an Islamist alliance that in...